Getting Started

Editor

First and foremost, you will need a decent text-editor or integrated developer environment. I use and recommend Visual Studio Code. VS Code is a free and open-source cross-platform development environment for Microsoft, designed from the ground-up to work with all the technologies you will be using. Of course, you are free to use whatever tool you are comfortable with.

Software tools

Developing and deploying an Ionic application requires some initial configuration. You will need the following tools, in addition to the code editor:

• Node
• NPM
• Git
• The Ionic CLI itself, installed globally

Most of the tools you will use rely on Node, a JavaScript-based runtime environment; I recommend the LTS (long-term-support) version.

NPM is a package manager built on top of node. Most of the tools you need are distributed as npm packages. It is installed with node.

Most of the tutorials for Ionic expect you to have Git, a powerful and flexible source control system, and its related tools. If you have a Mac or Linux, you probably already have it.

Installing these items depends on your platform. If you need detailed instructions on how to do that, refer to the rest of this chapter.